What we talk about when we talk about race

WAS THE police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates in his Cambridge home a racist, or did Gates overreact to a cop just doing his job?

Did President Obama make matters worse when he commented on the case during a Wednesday news conference, or did he make an important point?

Is that conversation, being carried out over Internet, TV, radio and print, the same one that's being conducted in Philadelphia over the controversial Domelights Web site?

A week after Gates was arrested, these questions - and what they mean in "post-racial" America - are still being hotly debated. No matter where you weigh in on the subject, it seems that the conversation about race in this country is lining up along familiar battle lines.

But what is a conversation about race supposed to sound like, anyway? And what do we expect from these conversations? After all, when we talk about race, we are really talking about vastly different human experiences. Many whites can't fathom the history and legacy of discrimination experienced by blacks, and blacks can't fathom why whites can't understand what that legacy means.

It's a stunning coincidence that the Cambridge affair was unfolding at the same time as the controversy over Domelights, the off-duty Philadelphia police Web site that has led to a lawsuit against the city brought by the Guardian Civic League on charges that its incendiary commentary has created a hostile work environment.

Both "Gates-gate" and "Dome-gate" quickly laid bare ugly truths about power, race and class in this society

But the truth is, while the two cases are related, they're not the same thing. For one thing, we know the names of the players in Cambridge: Gates, as well as Sgt. James Crowley. And we know the names of the people talking about it - Barack Obama, Al Sharpton and countless commentators with IDs under their faces. And as fractious as it can get at times, we believe this is what a conversation about race should sound like - especially if it ends up with a beer at the White House, as this one seems destined to do.

The postings on Domelights, on the other hand, are something else. When Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey disabled the site at police stations, and later, when the site was taken down completely, the loudest cry was about the loss of "free speech."

That's wrong, in both cases. On-duty police have no right to use city computers and time reading or writing speech that creates a hostile work environment.

Free speech accorded anonymous speakers is more complicated. While the courts have upheld broad protections for anonymous speech, that doesn't mean that anyone gets to say anything. Besides, isn't anonymous speech what you resort to when you don't have free speech? The beauty and genius of the First Amendment is that it grants us the right to speak freely as citizens, even those who don't hide behind a pseudonym.

That's what disturbs us about comments like those found on Domelights. What's the value of speaking "truth" if no one owns it, or owns up to it?

Domelights was not completely hostile. We found many attempts at real conversations - where people with divergent experiences tried to understand each other. But the more hostile and anonymous postings calling, for example, for a black woman to be gang raped, were proclamations of cowards. Such anonymous hate-filled postings are the 21st-century equivalent of hiding under a white sheet; asking us to tolerate it is asking us to cut out eyeholes for those sheets. *